Howdy, side hustlers!
When was the last time you called a plumber to fix a leaky faucet? Or brought your car to the shop for a regular change of oil?
If you answered never, then our newsletter this week will prove to be a eureka moment.
We’re diving deep into the exciting possibilities of selling online courses. And yes, your plumbing expertise has everything to do with it.
You see, there’s this myth circulating that eLearning is exclusive to academic subjects. And as always, your friendly neighborhood side hustlers are here to bust it.
There’s now an online course for everything.
Computer and technology are currently the most in-demand subject for online courses, but people are interested in more than just the nerdy stuff. Cell phone repair, video editing, and podcast production are popular subject for online courses, too.
Arts and crafts are the third most profitable online courses—isn’t that the most delightful surprise? What does this tell you, dear side hustlers?
Selling online courses can be a profitable side hustle for people who don’t have the time to commit to running their own full-time business.
You read that right.
This week’s newsletter will spill the beans on the whys and wherefores of selling online courses.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to keep an open mind and consider this as a possible side hustling route. You might just transform that plumbing know-how into a money-making enterprise.
What you can expect from this week’s newsletter:
- Trends: Our roundup of some interesting statistics on the eLearning industry
- Strategies: A potential goldmine is waiting to be unearthed. So get your digital shovel and dig in, stat!
- Tool of the Week: Who’s gonna enroll in classes made by a nobody? You’ll be surprised. This site delivers them in droves.
No time to waste; let’s get right to it!
Trends
Technology has revolutionized teaching and learning. Courses, seminars and classes no longer have to be confined to the classroom. How awesome is that?!
Here’s some impressive e-learning statistics we found:
- The worldwide e-learning market is projected to be worth $325 billion in 2025 (Source: Globe News Wire)
- The US e-learning market is set to grow by $12.81 billion between 2020 and 2024 (Source: Market Research)
- E-learning has led to an increase in income for 42% of US organizations (Source: eLearning Industry)
- IBM saved approximately $200 million after switching to e-learning (Source: Sh!ft)
- 49% of students worldwide stated they had taken an online course in the preceding 12 months (Source: Statista)
Now what do these statistics tell you dear side hustler? The eLearning industry continues to boom, with more and more people recognizing the value of taking their education into their own hands. Even big businesses are adopting the online learning model as a way to upskill employees at scale!
So what do you want to teach? German? Coding? Dog training? With online courses, the sky’s the limit!
Strategies
Who should sell online courses? Anyone with some knowledge to share with others!
If you’re trying to earn some extra cash, selling online courses might be a good opportunity. This is an excellent side hustle for people who work full-time.
Why selling online courses is a good side hustle
- Selling an online course allows you to set your own hours and schedule—perfect if you have other commitments like family or a 9-to-5. Freedom to earn money on your own terms and in your spare time is a major drawcard.
- It gives you complete control over your pricing structure. Since there aren’t any middlemen involved, you won’t pay commissions or fees. That means all profits will go directly into your pocket!
- A lucrative passive income, this side hustle involves creating digital products you can sell again and again, ad infinitum.
- The potential of it evolving into a full-time job is highly possible.
- It’s a low-risk business that can be started with little capital, with many choices available and multiple ways to market.
- You get access to a whole new audience of potential customers.
What kind of online courses can you sell?
Online courses run the gamut from soft skills training to coding boot camps. Some can be easier to put together than others, but it all depends on what you know.
One thing is sure: if you want to take your career in a new direction, there’s likely an online course that fits your existing skill set. And people who will pay to learn from you.
Teaching/Training/Tutoring
If you are an expert in a subject and enjoy sharing information with others, why not share your knowledge through a course?
For instance, children and teenagers often need help with science and mathematics. Make learning more accessible to them by discussing these subjects in a fun, friendly, and easy-to-understand way.
Adults, too, can benefit from your experience and street smarts. Think about it, if you’ve been an executive assistant to a CEO for 10 years, then you’ve got lots to share — train aspiring EAs on office etiquette, file management, business correspondence, and the like.
Personal Development
Are you good at helping others improve their lives? If so, selling self-care courses might be a great way for you to make money as a side hustle.
While personal development used to fall into the self-help territory, today, it often overlaps with self-care and mindfulness techniques. You don’t necessarily have to be an expert—you just need to understand how other people think and feel about themselves.
A few ideas:
- 10-Minute Daily Meditation (text, audio, or video)
- Getting and Staying Out of Debt
- Decluttering a la Marie Kondo
- Zero Waste Living
Sales and Marketing
Selling online courses is a very common side hustle for marketing professionals since they usually have strong communication skills.
Health and Wellness
This category includes everything from exercise instruction to nutrition tips to yoga classes. It’s no surprise that health and wellness coaching has been such a successful industry in recent years. Why not take a piece of that $14.48 billion-worth pie? People really do value taking better care of themselves.
Technology and Software
Many businesses rely on software every day. So if building programs or websites is on your resume, show the tech-challenged individuals out there how they can, too.
Writing, Editing, and Publishing
Anyone looking to develop their professional writing and editing skills will be grateful to find an online course that allows them to achieve it without the hassle of going to school. And if you’ve got the know-how on publishing as well, you’ll also capture the future-authors market.
Visual Arts
Graphic design and photography fall under this category. The internet loves pretty pictures, which makes these subjects ideal for online courses. The equipment that graphic designers and photographers use is often pricey. So if your would-be students can afford the gear, they most likely can afford your fees.
Sports and Fitness
From golf to weightlifting, there are a ton of sports out there and an equal number of rookies eager to become pros. If you’re good at a sport and want to try your hand at coaching or training, selling online courses is a profitable way to test out your ideas.
Music
Music lessons come in many forms: playing an instrument, singing, composing, conducting, and even simply reading notes on music sheets.
Singer, songwriter, and legend Roberta Flack was a music teacher before she killed the public softly with her songs. Dennis DeYoung, lead singer of the rock band Styx, had exactly the same background. So did Sheryl Crow. Mark Knopfler, frontman of Dire Straits, taught kids in country schools how to sing and play the guitar. You see, you’re in good company.
Language
If you come from mixed heritage, put your patrimony to good use by educating others to become fluent in your native tongue. The best thing about this subject is that your curriculum need not be very structured. It could be packaged as “conversational,” where you present the language in everyday settings like public markets, transportation, and parks.
Parenting
Another deep well of topics and sub-topics. You may be wondering, though, if people really enroll in classes that actually teach you how to be a parent.
The answer is yes. Many couples find online parenting courses more informative than books because coaches provide live demos of a thousand and one chores. Breastfeeding, changing diapers, installing a baby car seat, and potty training are just a few.
Parents of special children also need all the help they can get in providing their little ones the best physical, emotional, and mental care. The same goes with moms and dads dealing with teen pregnancy, addiction, and bullying.
Pets
Are chocolates really dangerous for dogs? How do I keep my cat from scratching the furniture? Why is my turtle restless all of a sudden? These are just some concerns of pet parents.
If you’re a vet or work for one, you may hold the answers to those burning questions. Give them peace of mind with lessons that will make pet parenting a breeze from day one.
Cooking and Baking
Share your unique gastronomic ideas with the world! From choosing the right ingredients to plating, you can easily build a 10-part cooking course packed with tips and tricks.
Course themes for this subject are a multitude as well. You may focus on a particular country’s cuisine, explore the wonderful world of veganism, or whip up 10-minute dishes. Baking, grilling, and bartending are popular topics, too.
Home and Garden
During the pandemic, interest in our homes and gardens exploded. There has never been a better time to offer courses on interior design, gardening, renovation, and housekeeping.
Hobbies and Crafts
Selling craft tutorials can be another fun and easy-to-do side hustle. Embroidery, knitting, pottery, recycling, flower arrangement, and scrapbooking are just some hobbies people find interesting.
How to put an online course together quickly and easily
Today, anyone can share knowledge quickly and easily by uploading a video to YouTube. But to earn an income and grow your business by selling online courses, you’ll need a better, more robust platform to create course pages and craft the curriculum.
For this reason, course creation platforms were created. These apps help streamline the whole process with everything you need. Then, you can focus on making good content.
Thinkific
The best software for creating your first online course from scratch, Thinkific offers all the templates you need. It addresses challenges like: How many lessons to include? Should learning objectives be divided into several chapters? Are assignments and quizzes given out at different points in the learning process? What file types do you upload?
Unlike other course platforms, Thinkific templates come with helpful tools and tips, so they’re not all a blank slate. Along with video lessons, the templates are already pre-populated with a list of features like quizzes, downloads, and surveys.
Pathwright
When using Pathwright, your courses will be 100% actionable for your learners. With an action-oriented approach to curriculum creation, the app’s course creator is both fluid and intuitive.
Draw up an outline of your course syllabus, then follow with a list of individual actions to complete. As you add each step, Pathwright allows you to assign students the action they need to take: watch, read, take, submit, attend, listen, or do.
Once your syllabus and content are outlined, Pathwright conveniently points out a ‘Needs Content’ note for each step.
Xperiencify
Online courses suffer from very low completion rates, and many learners abandon the course before it’s finished. That’s what Xperiencify aims to remedy. It makes courses more interesting and as simple as playing them like games.
By making courses more engaging with gamification and adding life-like content, the app boosts completion rates by 10-30%. For each module, students are given experience points (XPs). You can assign XP values and elements within them when creating your course.
You’re also allowed to come up with your own course celebration to make students’ progress meaningful. Videos are Xperiencify’s primary tool, but supporting resources such as PDFs, slides, and MP3s can be added as well.
Teachable
Of the course-building software currently available, Teachable lets a course creator do so much more. The platform offers many customization options to change the design and function of your course. You can also add documents from several different locations, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive.
Teachable gives advice on building a large online audience as well. Plus, you can publish your course on their website and use their marketing tools to promote it.
Podia
With Podia, you can create a shopping site for your digital products. Online course production, downloads, and membership can all be parts of your storefront.
All Podia storefronts have similar layouts, so you shouldn’t be overwhelmed by choices. Every course has its own landing page with an overview, the inclusions section, a section about content, and some Frequently Asked Questions. All memberships and digital downloads have their own landing page as well.
After creating your online course, you can upload it immediately or start with a teaser campaign to collect emails. If you have supplemental resources—cheatsheets, ebooks, videos, or audio—offer them as a digital download. Or sell them together.
Marketing your online course
There are many effective ways you can promote an online course, however, it will take some time and effort to figure out what strategies will work best for your offer.
Before you embark on a full-fledged marketing campaign, answer these questions:
- What is my niche?
- Who is my market?
- Where do I want my customers/clients to be coming from?
- How much money am I willing to spend on promotion?
Your answers will guide your marketing decisions.
Here are a few different strategies that have worked well for others selling online courses as a side hustle:
Facebook ads
Nowadays, marketers look smugly at each other and say, who doesn’t advertise on Facebook? And it’s not just because of the platform’s 3 billion active users.
With all the options to narrow your target audience down to their specific demographics, Facebook makes advertising both effective and economical. You also get to AB test campaigns using various keywords.
Marketing guru Neil Patel discusses Facebook advertising in-depth in this comprehensive guide.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliates are the digital version of sales reps. These individuals make a living by promoting other people’s products and services in exchange for a commission. They are valuable for the audience reach they’ve established over time.
Affiliate marketers are savvy, too, and able to create a buzz around your online course as if it were a brand. Their strategies include blog reviews, social media posts, and digital billboards.
Hubspot has written an exhaustive guide on affiliate marketing for beginners. It’s a great piece to learn everything you need to know about this strategy.
Email marketing
As the term suggests, this strategy means promoting your online courses via email. It involves building a list of email addresses and creating persuasive email content. Don’t worry; it sounds more labor intensive than it really is.
You can get the lowdown on email marketing from Mailchimp, one of the leading platforms that offer the service.
Your website
All of the above efforts should point your potential customers to where they can view your offers. You could build a website in addition to the marketplace where you initially post your online course.
On your site, you are king or queen. Your visitors are a captive audience waiting for you to, well, captivate them. A short video introduction, an information-rich blog, a customer service chatbot, and Add To Cart options are great features to add.
Okay, all this is starting to sound complicated. Just keep in mind that you don’t have to do them right away or all at the same time. Yours is a side hustle, after all.
Successful online courses that started as side hustles
Draw inspiration from these courses that started as side hustles and have since grown into six-figure businesses.
ConvertKit: How to Create a Website that Converts – Nathan Barry
Barry initially sold this short course for $17 on his website and later turned it into a comprehensive online course for $100. In less than a year, he was making over $10,000 per month.
Today, he’s earning over $200K monthly from digital products, including book publishing, designing web apps, and audience building.
I Will Teach You to be Rich – Ramit Sethi
Sethi made his first $1,000 while still in college when he started writing an email newsletter about personal finance. This evolved into a get-rich system which he taught to anyone interested, but for a fee.
Ramit has come a long way since then and now earns over $20 million annually through multiple products and services (including live events). He recently published a book called I Will Teach You to be Rich that reached #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list within two weeks of its release.
It all started when Khan tutored a family member living overseas. Because it went well, others in the family asked for the same kind of instruction. So, Khan made them publicly available.
Increasingly, people (including complete strangers) were drawn to Khan’s short video explanations and found them helpful. As his popularity grew, he turned his attention to online education full-time.
First, he built a website featuring free online courses. Then, he created a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Lastly, he amassed users and now has over 10 million unique visitors each month.
Tool of the week
This week we shine a spotlight on Udemy, a peer-to-peer marketplace for online courses.
Udemy features courses on every topic you can imagine. It offers authors a massive platform for reaching millions of potential students and making passive income in the process.
If you’re looking to start an online business as a side hustle, selling digital classes and instructional materials at Udemy might be your best bet.
The site has helped launch thousands of successful businesses by providing an easy way to share knowledge with others around the world via video lectures and interactive content.
Simply create your own course (or take someone else’s), set your price, promote it, then sit back while it sells itself.